I was seven years old when I got my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 133. It was Christmas of 1973. Since then, I have always seen the world through the lens. It is my way of making sense, of visually dealing with the paradoxes and complexities of life. In high school I was the lab rat and spent each free minute at the feet of the Beseler enlarger, hypnotized by its magical light. Still today I enjoy low light ambients.

Architecture school followed as photography was not a career option in my home town of Belo Horizonte, Brazil in those days. The combination of art, composition, light, form and space, coupled with the demands of physics found in Architecture have their parallel in photography. The concepts are transferable. As I started my career in Architecture, I soon found that I was more excited about the concept and the print than the actual building. Fantasy is my reality.

I kept shooting, learning and apprenticing with some incredible artists. In time, as life took its turns, my original passion became my profession. It has been almost 20 years since I walked into the pro shop and charged the Hasselblad and the studio lights to my credit card. As the salesman saw the bill and my naive optimism, he exclaimed, "you're going to have to sell a lot of pictures..." I did, and still do, but what drives me is not that. It is the unstoppable desire to understand and to relate. To me, that is photography.